Latest news with #hitters
Washington Post
14-07-2025
- Sport
- Washington Post
James Wood is in the Derby at 22. You should have seen him at 12.
There are competing theories about the origin of the swing that made James Wood one of the best young hitters in Major League Baseball. Here's one. During the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, Wood — a rising high school senior — would head to Washington Christian Academy with a childhood friend, Jake Becker, and their dads. The school, about 35 miles from Nationals Park, was the only one nearby with a 90-foot diamond.
New York Times
09-07-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
A Zero SP fantasy baseball strategy prioritizes hitters. What's the advantage?
Last week, we revisited the Zero SP draft strategy I recommended in February. Inevitably, I suggested not drafting a starting pitcher in at least the first five rounds and ideally abstaining through the seventh round. So, in the most extreme execution, no starting pitchers are selected before pick 100. Advertisement If we took the same approach with hitters, readers asked, what would those results be? In the comments of my Zero SP column, I said we don't need to 'statify' what we know, and we know hitters are less volatile than pitchers. But I've opted to put a fine point on this, at least for the first half of 2025. We can use first-half numbers to determine the chance of finding a top-30 hitter after pick 100 and selecting a bust among hitters in the top 100. In high-stakes drafts for the final week of the draft season, on average, 64 hitters were picked in the top 100 overall compared to 24 starting pitchers. Let's see where the top 30 hitters (as of July 8) were selected in March. I'm ranking the top hitters using auction values calculated by TGFantasyBaseball, based on 12-team mixed leagues with 70% of a $260 budget spent on hitting. Again, ADP is from high-stakes NFFC leagues for the final week of the draft season. Position value is factored minimally in the dollar values, as all positions are allocated a share of the 70% budget. We can quibble with these dollar values, but we're trusting them for this exercise as we did with the pitchers. So we have 33 hitters because of a tie for 30th place. Of those, 11 were drafted after pick 100 (or not drafted at all) compared to 23 of our top 32 pitchers (again, because of ties for 30th). For the hitters, that includes No. 2 (Pete Crow-Armstrong), No. 8 (Brandon Lowe), No. 9 (Byron Buxton), No. 11 (Michael Busch), No. 16 (Riley Greene) and No. 21 (Brice Turang). Two of the top 30 were mostly undrafted: Jonathan Aranda and Andy Pages. So, after pick 100, you still had a shot at 34% of the top hitters through the first half of this season. Compare that to 72% of the top-30 pitchers you could have drafted after pick 100. Now let's look at busts who have thus far devastated managers who picked them among the top 100: That's 20 disasters out of the 64 hitters picked in the top 100, a bust rate of 31%. The bust rate for starting pitchers selected in the top 100 was 42%. But, just five of the top-30 hitters drafted were busts, a bust rate of 17%. (You want to draft as many top-30 hitters as your league will allow.) So, 34% of the top-30 hitters were picked after pick 100, and 31% of those picked in the top 100 were busts. Compare that to 72% of the top 30 starting pitchers being chosen after pick 100, and 42% of the starting pitchers selected before pick 100 ending up as busts, thus far. There's little hope of finding top hitters on waivers during the season because so many more are drafted compared to pitchers. And the constant churn of pitchers, due primarily to injuries, creates opportunities for new ones to emerge in a steady stream. There is a lot less churn on a percentage basis with hitters. MLB managers know hitters tend to perform close to the back of the baseball card, so they are more patient with struggling hitters than with struggling starting pitchers. Advertisement We tend to find hitters early in the season, including Aranda (who I touted here early) and Pages; otherwise, we depend on prospect hitters getting promoted and hope they quickly acclimate to the big leagues — a tough ask. Let's end with a list of top hitters in expected stats (xwOBA) who may be available on waivers. Simply stated, there are not many options. That's it. Hitters are very hard to find at this point in the season, and it's not like these names, as well as they've hit in the past 30 days, offer much league-changing hope. (Photo of Pete Crow-Armstrong: Matt Marton / Imagn Images)
New York Times
20-06-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
Five bats fantasy baseball managers can actually drop, based on projections
If you stick closely to projections (as I do) and play a lot of keeper leagues (as I do), you take the long view on hitters most of the time. They'll come back around and play to the talent levels they've shown before, of course, why wouldn't they? Projections look at the sum of a player and put together the good times and the bad times and produce the most likely outcomes, and usually, those are about as rosterable as they were when you acquired the player. Advertisement But sometimes even the projections move enough on a player that we should recalibrate our feelings. If you've lost the projection systems, you've lost your last defender. To see which players have seen their projections move the most, I took preseason OOPSY projections from Jordan Rosenblum and compared them to his rest-of-season projections. Here are the 15 players who have seen their projections move downward the most compared to preseason expectations. I've listed them along with their Yahoo roster rates. There are already some obvious flaws with this approach. There are the hitters who might have taken a haircut but are still projected among the best hitters in the game, like Juan Soto, Mike Trout, and Gunnar Henderson. Nobody is advocating dropping these players. League average OPS is .712, and they're all 100-plus points clear of that, even with their reduced projections. There are also hitters here who will provide fantasy value with their legs, as Matt McLain, Michael Harris II, and, to a lesser extent, Kristian Campbell and Spencer Steer are non-zeroes on the basepaths. And then there are players who nobody had rostered anyway, like Joey Ortiz. Ahem. So let's try this another way. Which hitters have seen their OPS projections drop at least 10 points, but are sorted by the worst OPS projections (minimum 250 projected plate appearances)? Surely these players are not great, and maybe also on the precipice of losing their jobs? Nobody on this list was projected to have a league average OPS, and then they played so poorly that they saw their projections drop further. Speed once again is a complicating factor, but it's still instructive to note that while Parker Meadows has the defensive chops to keep his job despite poor OPS projections, the Miami Marlins just moved Xavier Edwards to second base. He's a sell in keeper formats if he has any value, because legs can only take a player so far. The next problem is that once you scan over to the roster levels, you'll see that nobody was really all-in on these players anyway, with a notable exception or two. Advertisement We still have the stolen base problem. Let's try one last way. Here are the players who have lost the most projected fantasy value since the preseason, using OOPSY in the FanGraphs auction calculator with 15-team Roto 5×5 settings. I've removed players who are currently in the minors or suffering from long-term injury, or who were projected for negative value to begin the season, in order to make this list more useful. This once again has some less-than-useful information. Nobody is still holding on to Orlando Arcia at this point since he lost his starting job and is a utility player, and ownership levels in a lot of the other categories are pretty low. Nobody is dropping Yordan Alvarez despite the change in projected outcomes. But there are also some interesting names on here for those who were holding out hope for players like Brandon Marsh and Lane Thomas — if they are basically underwater in 15-teamers with five outfielders, by sober projections, then there's no reason to keep holding them for the future in most leagues. Let's highlight five bats who have shown up on a lot of these lists but aren't slam-dunk drops at first glance. Recently, Adames has performed a little better, and that coincides with his rolling swing speed finally poking about the 75th percentile for the first time this season. But it's a long swing, and if you judge him instead by swing acceleration (which considers contact point), he just nudged above the 10th percentile. The thing is, we've seen this from Adames before, so it's not too surprising. Many of his numbers seem right in line with what he did in 2023, when he had a .217 average and hit 24 homers (except worse in the power department, really). That year, he was the 20th-best shortstop when all was said and done. Even if he picks it up and ends up near those numbers, the stolen bases aren't going to be there like last year, and maybe there's someone out there who can be better than 20th for you at the position? He's still a $3 player in 12-team leagues with a middle infield slot, according to OOPSY rest-of-season projections, but that's droppable territory if you see something better out there. Of the players highlighted here, McLain is the toughest drop for a couple of reasons, though. First, second base is a really tough position this year. It's only produced six players who would be above-replacement players without the positional adjustment (shortstop has 16), and the lesser-rostered, better-projected second basemen ahead of McLain (Jonathan India, Luis Garcia Jr.) aren't slam-dunk decisions. Second, he's stealing bases and likely to finish the season with at least a shot at a 20-20 season. But the batting average isn't going to be great, and the power, which wasn't supported fully by his batted-ball stats, has not returned (and wasn't helped by a loss of bat speed). If the steals won't mean that much to you, McLain could be a drop in shallower leagues. Advertisement Everything has gone badly for Santander in Toronto. The strikeout rate went up (career-worst), the fly-ball rate went down, the hard-hit rate went down (five-year low), as did his barrel rate (career-worst) and max exit velocity (career-worst). His bat has lost over a mile per hour of bat speed (to the point that it's almost average from the left side), and his swing has gotten flatter in terms of tilt, so he's just pulling balls on the ground now. Jorge Soler, who is rostered in a third of the leagues as Santander, is projected to be better. In the deepest leagues, you just have to hold and hope, but projections have him under $3 going forward in 15-team leagues with players like Alec Burleson and the returning Luke Raley ranked higher. You probably have a better option on your wire versus waiting for him to get healthy. Steer's lack of bat speed this year can indeed be most likely attributed to his spring injury to the shoulder, but it's also true that there's no evidence in his rolling swing speed graphs that the joint is feeling any better in recent days. Keeper league players have a harder decision — Steer could use a full healthy offseason, most likely, and any return of bat speed could make him a viable 20-10 guy again — but in leagues playing just for 2025, the four stolen bases aren't enough to hang around for. Christian Encarnacion-Strand projects better and is out there in nearly three-quarters of Yahoo leagues, and if you need some stolen bases, Jake Cronenworth is rostered in fewer leagues and projects better. There are better options than Steer right now in all but the deepest leagues. In 12-team leagues with a middle infielder slot, OOPSY projects Story to be below replacement, which might be surprising at first. He has double-digit homers and steals and has had his moments this year. But the real tragedy of leaving Coors Field behind is that his batting average is no longer buoyed by altitude. Now he strikes out 30 percent of the time and has the batting average to match. It's a bit like McLain — how much batting average do you want to pay for your 20/20 season — but at a position where there are more options. Even if you want power and speed, Masyn Winn and Ezequiel Tovar might be able to help you without hurting in batting average as much. Looking at roster rates, though, Story has probably already been dropped in most leagues where he should have been, and is a tentative hold in the deepest leagues. (Photo of Willy Adames: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
